Interesting solution in Antwerp by Portugese firm PROAP (João Nunes) and the Belgian architectural planners WIT, to knit the waterfront back into the urban core while protecting the city from 4,000-year floods:
The reestablishment of Antwerp’s connection to its waterfront has been a goal for the city’s planners for more than a decade, but only recently have forces aligned to make that dream not just a practical reality but also a necessity. The 130-year-old bluestone quay wall running along the Scheldt (pronounced “Skel-duh” by locals) has deteriorated to the point where reconstruction is no longer a luxury. At the same time, the entire harbor must be brought into compliance with the state’s Sigma Plan, a regional flood-prevention initiative first implemented in 1977 as a response to massive flooding and then recommissioned in 2004, which requires that the city be fortified to withstand a 4,000-year storm.
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The PROAP/WIT scheme was more diagrammatic, in both its form of presentation and its design strategy. “Landscape is created by successive processes and not by one action,” Nunes says. “We put together a master plan instead of a project. We decided to present a table of scenarios with approaches and consequences, trying to reduce things to a blank slate where some basic rules—a process—could be developed.”
That process will be governed by a series of ten topographical sections that read from above like the keys of a piano. Each key will address the river in a distinct fashion: one section, resting on pontoons, will rise and fall with the tides; another will slope down gradually from a protective berm; a third will cantilever out over the water. All suitably answer the demands of the Sigma Plan while retaining access—visual and physical—to the river.